Download Buddhism and Modernity

Buddhism and Modernity
Jay L Garfield
Smith College
University of Melbourne
Central University of Tibetan Studies
1. Introduction: Authenticity and Impermanence
Those of us who are involved as teachers, scholars or practitioners with Buddhism in the West are—
whether we wish to be or not—involved in a complex process of interaction between two cultures. Just as
in the West Socrates urged that the most important task set for us in life is to know ourselves in the
Buddhist tradition we are admonished to know the nature of our own minds as the key to awakening. In
every Buddhist tradition, to know the nature of the self and its objects is the fundamental prerequisite to
cutting off the root of cyclic existence.
So even though it might seem like a kind of mundane and secular phenomenon, trying to understand the
history and the sociology of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, understanding it is necessary for
understanding ourselves, just because we are so intimately involved with it, and understanding ourselves
is necessary for liberation. This is just one more instance of the need to pay attention to mundane, secular
phenomena around us, even if our primary interests are soteriological. Of course for those whose primary
interest is the understanding of the contemporary Buddhist world for its own sake, it is plain that the
engagement of Buddhism with modernity is an issue of concern. We should be alert as we examine this
engagement to the inevitable transformations Buddhism will work on modern culture, as well as to the
inevitable transformations that modernity will work on Buddhism. As we consider the transformations of
modern culture in which the importation of Buddhism will issue, we should be aware of this as a
missionary process, in which the West is largely a patient, not an agent. As we consider the ways in which
Buddhism will inevitably modernize, we should be wary of the rhetoric of authenticity that can cloak a
reactionary defensiveness among practitioners that can threaten the relevance of the Buddhadharma to the
modern world.
Buddhism has been from the very beginning a missionary religion. Though this is a commonplace for
anyone who has been involved in Buddhist Studies, it is something of which Western Buddhists aren’t
always explicitly aware when they first encounter Buddhadharma. Missionaries went out from Sanchi to
spread Buddhism throughout India; Missionaries went out as well to Sri Lanka, to China, to Indonesia,
and of course eventually to Tibet, Korea and Japan, and Buddhism has spread through Asia not by
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accident, not by magic, not by sheer dint of the attractiveness or manifest truth of the Buddhadharma, but
through deliberate missionary activity.
In every one of these transmissions within Asia Buddhism has transformed the cultures that it has
invaded. Equally importantly, in every one of these transmissions Buddhism itself has been transformed
by the cultures that have adopted it. When we examine Buddhism’s entry into China we see that Chinese
society, Chinese philosophy, including the philosophical systems of Daoism and Confucianism, become
deeply inflected by Buddhist ideas. We see the growth of Buddhist monasteries altering aspects of the
economic and social organizations of China and we see the debates between Buddhists and Daoists and
Confucians as developing the Daoist and Confucian tradition in ways other than they would have
developed without this dialogue. When Buddhism was imported in Tibet Tibetan society was transformed
beyond recognition from its pre-Buddhist nature to its Buddhist nature.
As I indicated above, this transformative process is a two-way street, and it is instructive to examine the
way Buddhism itself was articulated and developed in China and to compare it with the way it was
articulated and developed in Tibet. The schools of Buddhism that developed in China—the Hua Yen
tradition, the Chan tradition, the Tian Tai tradition—look very different textually, doctrinally, and in the
forms of practice they involve, from those that are developed in Tibet. The Indic scholasticism, as well as
the emphasis on tantra we find in Tibet are largely absent from China. The emphasis on stra, the
syncretism among Indian traditions, and the composition of apocryphal stras we find in China are absent
in Tibet. Meditational practices are very different, and while vinya codes are distinct, actual monastic
life looks quite different in Tibet and China. Given the topic of this chapter, there is no need to go into
this in detail here. The issues are well-known.
Buddhist practitioners and scholars in almost every tradition valorize lineage and each valorizes the
preservation of the “authentic” Buddhist tradition over the centuries. But it is also a central tenet of all
Buddhist doctrine that nothing gets preserved unchanged and pure even from moment to moment, so that
rhetoric of authenticity demands critique. Sometimes, that is, what appears to be heresy is in fact the most
authentic and orthodox path. My own thoughts about what happens when Buddhism moves into the West
are grounded in the conviction that the transmission of Buddhism to the West is in one sense completely
continuous with what has happened throughout the history of Buddhism: the entry of Buddhism into
diverse cultures, resulting in the transformation of those cultures and of Buddhism itself.
When we look from the West, for instance, at the multiple lineages of Buddhism in Asia, no serious
scholar asks the narrow, parochial question, “Which lineage is the authentic Buddhism?” To do so would
mark one as a narrow sectarian. One hopes as well that practitioners do not think this way. Rather, to the
extent that we are interested in comparing traditions, we want to ask ourselves how and why Buddhism
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developed so productively in all of these different directions. This multiplicity of lines of development,
and the continuity of growth is a sign of the vitality of the Buddhist tradition, not of its weakness. We
don’t expect that a whole tree is going to look just like the roots; we hope that on each branch flowers are
going to develop; and we don’t see the diversity of form, whether in a living organism or in a society as a
sign of ill health, but as a sign of good health.
I emphasize all of this—even though much of it is commonplace—only because very often in the context
of discussions of Buddhism and the modern world, when one mentions the ways Buddhism transforms
Western culture, people are happy to see this transformation and to see a kind of improvement in Western
culture, but then when they see respects in which Buddhist practice or Buddhist ideas themselves develop
or evolve or transform in interaction with Western culture, they become afraid and they recoil in orthodox
horror: the Buddhadharma is no longer authentic! It’s no longer pure! It’s no longer real Buddhism!
Something happened to it! It is that reaction that I really want to put aside, because transformation and
development in response to engagement with new cultural contexts and new sets of ideas has been
happening to Buddhism from the moment the Buddha touched the Earth at Bodhgaya. Buddhism has been
transforming because all compounded things are impermanent and Buddhism is a compounded
phenomenon.
2. Historical comparisons
Let us return to the difference between the transmission of Buddhism to China and the transmission of
Buddhism to Tibet. This comparison will provide us with a useful way of understanding some of the
interesting features of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, and will help us to see both what is
continuous with the history of transmission within Asia, and what is subtly different. I will necessarily be
guilty of a bit of caricature and overstatement but the caricatures will be useful.
Here is a big difference between the two transmissions: when Buddhism came to, Tibet Buddhism came
to a country that had no written language, very little political unity, a religious tradition that was only
really practiced by a tiny minority, andno written philosophical tradition. So, while it would be an
exaggeration to say that Tibet was a tabula rasa for Buddhism, it wouldn’t be too much of an
exaggeration. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama sometimes puts it, “When we Tibetans decided that we
needed a civilization, we decided we needed three things: We needed a religion, we needed clothes and
we needed food. We looked at China; they had the best food so we took that. We looked at Mongolia;
they had the best clothes, we took those; and we looked South to India; they had the best religion, so we
took that.”
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Tibet deliberately adopted a high-medieval version of Indian Buddhism, and in particular the Tradition
developed in Nland University, and deliberately set itself about the task of replicating that very tradition
and perpetuating and preserving it, creating the strangest museum culture that the world has ever seen—a
culture developed to preserving a moment in 10th/11th century Indian culture forever, including its
monastic structure, university curriculum, schools of doctrine, as well as traditions of medicine, poetry,
etc… Tibet did a remarkably good job of this, and for that the world—not just the Buddhist world, and
certainly not just the Tibetan Buddhist world—owes Tibet an enormous debt of gratitude. Without this
preservation, with a remarkable, though to be sure not perfect, degree of fidelity, much of Indian learning
and culture would have been lost, including most of Mahyna Buddhist culture.
In China the situation was very different. When Buddhism came to China, China was already a very old
civilization, with a written language, a tradition of high culture, a well-organized government and
educational system, and two well-established philosophical and religious traditions—the Confucian and
Daoist Traditions—sophisticated literature, poetry, art. Buddhism came to this sophisticated culture from
outside through missionaries. When Buddhism arrived, most literate and sophisticated people in China
thought that Buddhism was weird, crazy, possibly dangerous to the social and political order and at least
barbarian. And from the perspective of Chinese culture, one would have to say that they were right on
all counts.
For this reason, the penetration of Buddhism into China was slow and deliberate. Buddhism was first
adopted by what we might call the middle-class, an educated elite who were attracted to the unusual
language and were interested in the philology, in the texts, and gradually developed an interest in
Buddhist doctrine and practice. Of course Buddhism penetrated China very thoroughly over time, but it
was a gradual and partial penetration: China never became entirely Buddhist. Buddhism always lived
alongside the Confucian and Daoist traditions and while it proliferated in a number of different schools,
none of these became politically dominant forces or majority religious traditions.
Moreover, because of the slow penetration of Buddhism into China, whereas when Buddhism came to
Tibet an entire canon along with its history and doxography were delivered as a unit from India (give or
take a bit) when Buddhism came to China, it came in drips and drabs, with an unsystematic selection of
texts delivered, and the complete Indian tradition never entirely transplanted. The lacunae in the textual
tradition are often as important in understanding the history of Chinese Buddhism as are the texts
transmitted and composed in China itself.
There is a further difference that it is important to note: when Buddhism came to Tibet the Tibetan
language was basically reconfigured and reinvented in order to translate Sanskrit, and became a highly
Sanskritised language as a vehicle for translation, simply because there was no philosophical vocabulary
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in Tibetan when Buddhism arrived. When Buddhism came to Tibet, the decision to translate the Buddhist
canon into Tibetan was the decision to create a regimented system of translation, through which the
classical Tibetan language came into existence as a vehicle expressly designed to translate Sanskrit.
Translations were accomplished by teams of eminent scholars responsible to an imperial translation
comiteee than ensured both the quality and the homogeneity in style and technique of translations.
When Buddhism came to China, on the other hand, classical Chinese was a highly developed and very
subtle philosophical language with an extraordinary vocabulary for expressing philosophical ideas and a
rich set of metaphors, arguments and concepts in common currency. When Buddhism came to China,
anyone who wanted to translate could pick up a Sanskrit text and translate in his own way, using
whatever vocabulary and textual approaches he saw fit. Most used the philosophical language of Daoism
and Confucianism to render technical terms in Buddhist Sanskrit. The combination of multiple
translators, a pre-existing philosophical vocabulary or set of vocabularies that more apparently than really
overlapped Sanskrit vocabulary in semantic range, the haphazard order in which texts arrived in China,
the lacunae in the literature that did eventually arrive and the lack of any central control over the
translation process led to the creation of Chinese Buddhist translations that often differ dramatically from
one another, and that deploy language that encodes philosophical meanings very different from those
encoded by Indian Buddhism.
Now I find this contrast instructive, because when we think about the nature of the transmission of
Buddhism to the West and we look for past models on the basis of which to understand it, the model is
not Tibet. As Buddhism has come to the West it has arrived in a culture that is already literate, that
already has political institutions and religious institutions and sophisticated philosophy and art and
literature and ideas. It has come unsystematically, in dribs and drabs, with large textual lacunae
remaining. No imperial translation mandate has been created. And Buddhism comes as a strange new
import. Some people find it weird, some people find it dangerous, and some people even find it barbarian!
We should imagine ourselves as in the very state that China was in when Buddhism first came to China.
And so for that reason, just as in China we find the development of a number of very different
Buddhist systems of translation, systems of practice, systems of philosophy, each of them inflected by
antecedent Chinese ideas, we should expect as we see Buddhism develop in the West that it will penetrate
slowly, that it will penetrate in many diverse forms with many different translational ideas, inflected in
very important ways by different ideas from the West. And just as Buddhism is alive and well and
thriving in China, Korea and Japan, because it draws nourishment not only from its Indian roots but also
from its East Asian rain and soil, it’s going to be alive and well in the West for years to come because it
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draws nourishment not only from its Indian roots but from the rain and fertility of Western ideas, and that
needs to be a cause for celebration, not for anxiety, as we go forward.
3. Modern Differences
Now, similarities are one thing, but there is also a distinctive feature of the transmission of Buddhism to
the West, one that has no real antecedent in Asian transmissions. in Asia, while Buddhism was
transmitted from India to other cultures, there was very little or no back-influence from those cultures on
Indian Buddhism or, for that matter, any such back-influence anywhere along the chain of transmission.
China did not affect Indian Buddhism, Japan did not affect Chinese Buddhism or Korean Buddhism, Sri
Lankan Buddhism did not have effects back on Indian, and so forth: the transmission of Buddhism in
Asia was very much a one-way street. But when we examine the transmission of Buddhism to the West,
things look very different because this transmission occurs in the context of globalization and in the
context of significant Asian diasporas in the West; and as a consequence, one of the very important
distinctive phenomena that we see as Buddhism encounters modernity through the medium of the
transmission to the West is the reflection of Western ideas and Western Buddhisms back into Asia.
There is a second major difference between the transmissions of Buddhism within Asia and the
transmission of Buddhism to the West, because in Asia we typically saw the transmission of a single
lineage or a single tradition from one place to another at a time. Nland went to Tibet, the Chan tradition
comes to central China, the Tian Tai tradition into South China, the Theravda Tradition into Sri Lanka
and into Thailand. But when we look at the transmission into the West, we see simultaneous
transmissions of Theravda Traditions, of Tian Tai traditions, of Zen Traditions, of multiple Tibetan
lineages all coming in at once, often to the same places! Because of their co-presence we see practitioners
picking up not a single tradition or a single lineage, but a long list of practices and ideas and texts from
different lineages; we also see Buddhist scholarship and the evolution of doctrine informed not by single
textual or oral transmission lineages, but rather by the integration of ideas deriving from multiple
lineages, coming to us in multiple languages. This multiple simultaneous transmission will have a
profound effect on the shape of Western Buddhism and on the shape of Asian Buddhism as a
consequence.
The complexity was evident right at the very beginning of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, as
Western Orientalists, spiritual seekers, historians and philologists encountered Asia. But this encounter,
beginning at the dawn of the 19th Century, also introduces a third distinctive feature of Buddhism’s
modern avatar: as Buddhism has moved to the West, Buddhism was, and continues to be, associated in an
almost paradoxical way with the idea of modernism. The founding moment of all of this—this is again a
bit of a caricature—is that strange American Henry Steele Olcott’s arrival in Sri Lanka and “discovering”
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that the Buddhism that he found in Sri Lanka was the most modern, most “secular “religion possible.
Olcott noticed that Buddhism is atheistic; that it emphasizes the use of reason; that it encourages textual
study; and he saw here the embodiment of all of the Enlightenment ideals he saw as incompatible with the
religions of the West.
One might expect that Olcott would then simply return America to champion Buddhism. And of course
he does. But before doing so, he does what every Buddhist teacher must do: he finds a disciple. And the
disciple he finds is Anagarika Dharmapala. Olcott convinces the young Anagarika Dharmapala (a) that
Buddhism is the true religion of the modern world and that he shouldn’t become a Christian, and (b) that
it’s his mission to bring modernity through Buddhism into Asia. So Anagarika Dharmapala sets out both
to modernize Buddhist practice in Sri Lanka and Asia and to modernize Asia through the propagation of
Buddhism.
The discovery that Buddhism isn’t ancient but modern, the inflection of Buddhism by modernity in Asia,
begins at exactly the same time that Buddhism gets transmitted to the West. This representation of
Buddhism as modern, and more recently as science, as ecocentric, as concerned with human rights, and
even as feminist has been a constant trope in the development of Buddhism in the West, and, as a
consequence, in modern Asia. This coevality of Western Buddhism and Western–inflected Asian
Buddhism gives rise to a history of Asian Buddhism adopting Western ideas in the course of its
confrontation with modernity, and the West adopting Buddhist ideas at the same time—and this is the
deep tension that runs through Buddhism today—it is represented in Asia, and in the West; in the Dharma
Centre and in the academy at the same time as ancient wisdom passed down through an infallible lineage,
and completely modern and critical. This tension animates modern Buddhism.
Of course I am painting with a very broad brush, and to fill in the detail would require discussion of
each of the many transmissions of Buddhism to the West and that is well beyond the scope of this
chapter; but the big picture is still valuable, because this transmission of Buddhism to the West and this
concomitant transmission of the West and of Western ideas into Buddhist cultures has been accelerated in
the 20th and 21st centuries by the phenomenon of globalization and by the Diaspora of Asian Buddhist
communities in the West, and understanding that big picture is central to understanding the state of
Buddhism today.
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4. The Modern Western Inflection of Buddhism
Let us now review some of the important ways in which Western ideas have inflected Buddhism not only
in the West, but also in Asian cultures, and in ways that they continue to do so. I urge that we think of
this not as the pollution of a stainless trasmission, but rather as the kind of development and flourishing of
Buddhism that has made Buddhism a vital tradition over the past two-and-a-half millennia. This will not
be an exhaustive survey, but should do enough to indicate the lay of the land.
Let us consider the socially-engaged-Buddhist movement which arose initially in South East Asia through
the work with people like but not only Thich Nhat Hanh but also Ajahn Sulak Sivaraksa. This tradition is
a very new tradition, and it is a tradition of Buddhist organizations engaged in social service; in the
development of schools, of hospitals, of social welfare agencies, of hospice care and so forth. This is a
feature of Buddhist activity that many of us in the West take to be a natural outgrowth of teachings of
compassion that have been present in the Buddhist teachings from the time of the Buddha. But this
apparent truism raises a difficult question: if socially engaged Buddhism, or eco-Buddhism, is a natural
outgrowth of the teachings of compassion why did it take a little over 2000 years to these things to
happen?
This is a complicated question, with a complicated answer, but the real explanation of the recent
emergence of these movements has less to do with any historical necessity internal to the Buddhist
tradition than it has to do with the fact that the leaders of these modern movements interacted with
Christian and Catholic missionaries as well as secular activists attracted to Buddhism. The Christian
example showed that a religious organization could indeed be involved in mundane social welfare
activities, and the Buddhist activists brought these issues to the fore within Buddhist communities,
drawing from Western secular movements. It was hence an inflection of Buddhism by Western secular
and religious traditions traditions that brought about the socially-engaged-Buddhist movement. This is
not a bad thing, either for the West or for Buddhism. But it is an example of how modernity has
transformed Buddhism, and, many would argue, for the better.
Eco-Buddhism is another pertinent example. Consider Thailand where the institution of the ordination of
trees has been introduced as a way of protecting forests, followed by the ordination of waterways and
other natural phenomena. This is ordination in a metaphorical sense of course; but the idea that Buddhism
is of direct ecological import—an idea encouraged and defended even by HH the Dalai Lama and HH the
Karmapa, as a natural outgrowth of the doctrine of interdependence and the cultivation of compassion—is
to be caken literally. But if we ask where this ecological teaching is promulgated within the classical
Buddhist tradition, we will come up empty. It is not present in any Pli suttas, or in any Mahyha stras,
or in any classical Indian or Chinese astras. Instead, it comes from the Western ecology movement; it
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was from the Transcendalists, and from the Greens. And so this is another way in which Buddhism has
been enriched and inflected by Western ideas, and once again, this is not a bad thing.
Institutionally, feminism has done wonderful things for Buddhism. The drive for the restoration of the full
ordination lineage for nuns in the Theravda and in the Tibetan traditions through the Chinese lineage did
not come initially from Asian Buddhists; this came from Sakyadhita, this came from the work of Western
nuns who brought Western feminism into Buddhism and created the impetus for full ordination. To be
sure, the lineage and active fully ordained nuns was already prominent in Taiwan. But the extension to
the broader community of women religious was a very much a product of Western modernism, as, we
might point out, was the very pan-Buddhist consciousness that was required to transmit that lineage from
China back to Thailand and Sri Lanka whence it came, and to the Tibetan diaspora community in its
curiously European face. So again this is a way in which Buddhism has learned from modernity ideas;
feminism is a modern idea; it’s not a traditionally Asian, or a Buddhist, idea.
There is another kind of intra-Buddhist phenomenon that derives from the Western transmission that is
less appreciated but nonetheless interesting, and takes us back to that early Buddhist modernist Henry
Steele Olcott. Perhaps the strangest thing that Henry Steele Olcott did was first, to decide that Buddhism
needed a flag, and then to design one. Now, of course, that Buddhist flag is ubiquitous in Asian Buddhist
events and locales. I find it amusing to ask random Asian Buddhists about the origins of the flag. I am
usually told sincerely that it dates from the time of the Buddha, or at least from the time of Akoka. Few
acknowledge that it was designed by an American military officer. Why is this important? Olcott’s idea
was that if you had a flag you had unity, and Olcott was worried that there was so much difference
between Japanese Buddhism, Korean Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sri Lankan Buddhism that this
threatened the very unity of the one religion that was truly modern. if only they had the same flag, he
reasoned, people would know that Buddhism was a unitary phenomenon.
While the flag may not have succeeded in homogenizing the Buddhadharma, the transmission to the West
that Olcott’s enthusiasm helped stimulate, as well as the pan-Asianism that his disciple Anagarika
Dharmapala’s mission to India helped to galvanize have moved us in that direction. If we attend to the
Buddhist world in Asia now, one of the consequences of the multiple simultaneous transmission of
Buddhist traditions to the West is that in the West Zen practitioners started talking to Tibetan Lamas who
started talking to Goenka meditators who also started talking to Korean Zen practitioners. Sometimes a
few Theravda monks join the conversation, and all of a sudden sitting around a table in a Dharma centre
or university in Sydney, Hamburg, Chicago are people in red robes, grey robes, yellow robes and brown
robes all talking about ideas together. Then back in India, we find Tibetans going on Goenka retreats or
sitting in Zen meditation. In Japan, we see Tibetan Lamas giving Mahamudra instruction in Zendos. In
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New Mexico, a Westerner and a Tibetan might be found teaching together in a Japanese Zendo. And
finally, we find in Sarnath, a Vinya conference drawing together monks and nuns from all Buddhist
traditions for the first time since the great councils, and event that would have been impossible without
the mediation of Western modernity. So the interaction of Buddhists in the West, who in Asia might have
said “I am a practitioner of this lineage, your practice is not actually Buddhism,” leads to Buddhists
around the world saying instead, “See that flag? We all rally behind the same flag. So, whatever
superficial differences divide us, we all follow the same Buddhadharma.”
This, I believe, is the most profound effect of the transmission of Buddhism to the West and of its
absorption of modern ideas, including the ideas of progressivity and pluralism. Buddhists in different
traditions are learning from each other. The insights that are available in the Tibetan tradition are often
valuable to practitioners and scholars of the Zen tradition; insights from the Zen tradition are often
equally valuable to practitioners and scholars in the Tibetan tradition. For centuries, great scholarship and
practice have been present in every one of these lineages. But for too long, these lineages have been
hermetically sealed from one another. This is the legacy the rhetoric of authenticity. It has been the
reflection of Buddhism through the West in the context of modern globalization that has broken down
those walls to the benefit of all of those concerned.
This interaction has been driven by a variety of forces, including immigration, exile, missionary activity,
but also the institution of modern Buddhist scholarship—both Western and Asian—usually in the context
of universities and colleges, but sometimes in the context of independent Dharma centres. Academic
Buddhist Studies has had significant reflective influence on Buddhist practice because modern scholars to
approach material differently from the way people in many traditional Buddhist cultures approach study.
For one thing, modern scholars tend to focus on a kind of philological and historical completeness. We
like to read a lot of different texts, and we like to read primary texts as well as commentaries. We work to
excavate texts; we edit them; we read them; we translate and compare texts from different traditions,
extant in different languages.
By contrast many of the traditionally Asian centers of Buddhist learning have fairly rigid, narrow
historical curricula where very often students study primarily secondary literature, monastic textbooks or
commentaries and not root texts. Even when they do study root texts, they often study only one or two
root texts in a tradition. And when they study commentaries, tend not to study rival commentaries from
other schools, but only the commentary of their own school. So for instance if you were to be studying
Madhyamaka in most monastic colleges in Tibet or in Indian Tibet, you would not read
M lamadhyamakak rik . You might in an advanced course memorize Madhyamakvatra but you would
only seriously study it through a single commentary within your tradition, or, more likely, through a
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textbook or digest. You certainly would not even read commentaries even from other Tibetan traditions,
let alone those composed in languages other than Tibetan.
If, on the other hand, you were to study Madhyamaka in most modern colleges or universities you would
begin by reading M lamadhyamakak rik ; you would read several other texts by Ngrjuna; you would
read you would read several Indian commentaries by those and then you would compare several Tibetan
commentaries, and perhaps a Chinese commentary or two because that would be regarded as the right
way to study the texts. As more and more traditional scholars and practitioners are educated in, or come
to teach in, modern universities, this approach to textual study and to conceptualizing the structure of the
Buddhist canon as a complex, conflicted, trans-cultural, progressive, multilingual canon infuses the world
of Buddhist practice in its more traditional centres.
As a further consequence, strange things begin to appear on the bookshelves of traditional scholars and of
students in traditional Buddhist centres of practice and learning. If you enter student hostels at the Central
University of Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, for instance, you will find not only Sanskrit and Tibetan editions
of texts, but also translations by Jeffrey Hopkins, Bob Thurman, or Don Lopez sitting on students’ desks.
When students are supposed be studying a particular text in Tibetan these Tibetan students are very often
reading English translations and English commentaries, in part because they find the English much more
accessible than the classical Tibetan, but for the most part because they find the modern scholarly
approach to these texts by translators and editors who bring these texts into a larger context, more
illuminating then that of the classical scholars who are often providing little more than word glosses. As a
consequence, modern readings, often inflected by Western philosophical ideas, are now moving back into
Asia as students who are studying these modern texts, learn Buddhism in in a modern register.
And this phenomenon of course is also opening Buddhist scholars’ eyes to the presence of a sophisticated
Western philosophical tradition that underlies a lot of these translations that they are reading. As a
consequence we see Tibetan, Japanese, Chinese Buddhist scholars beginning to turn to the study of
Western philosophy as a second way in to the ideas of Buddhist philosophy sometimes as a prvapaka,
as an opponent to be refuted, but sometimes as a different way of putting some of the same points. And
so, just as in China we saw Buddhism inflected by Daoism and Confucianism, in the West and in Asia we
are going to see Buddhism inflected by the history of Western philosophy, the philosophical tradition that
undergirds modernity.
Henry Steele Olcott’s modernism of course is still alive and well; and we see that in the very rich and
ongoing engagement with Buddhism and the sciences, in particular of course theoretical physics and
neuroscience and cognitive science, which have been of enormous interest to His Holiness the Dalai
Lama and to many other Buddhist scholars; and Buddhism as a reservoir of techniques has been of great
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interest for instance to people in theory of pain reduction, stress reduction and so forth. Programs such as
Mind and Life, Science for Monks, the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars Program and others are integrating
Buddhism with modern science either through research or through curriculum development. These
programs are motivated by the conviction that Buddhism and science are naturally in harmony; that they
share the same basic outlook, the same empirical concern, and that their results will converge. While
some might say that this convergence is inevitable because Buddhism always was a science, others see
the convergence as inevitable because of the recent embrace of science by Buddhism, an embrace that
has, perhaps surprisingly, been eagerly reciprocated.
The fecund interaction between Buddhism and science reflects and reinforces Buddhist modernism. That
the techniques and analyses of Buddhism turn out to be of interest to scientists burnishes Buddhism’s
modernist credentials. But the genuine openness of Buddhist scholars and practitioners to developments
in physics and psychology exemplifies Buddhist modernity and demonstrates that this is a tradition that is
open to empirical science and to reason. In this interaction not only does Buddhism contribute to Western
science but Western science contributes to Buddhism as well. When HH the Dalai Lama teaches about
emptiness, for instance, very often he’ll mention quantum mechanics. When he talks about the nature of
mind he’ll very often mention phenomena in consciousness studies or in neuroscience. These ideas and
examples come straight out of the modern laboratory in yet another instance of the inflection of
Buddhism by modernity
5. The Problem of Authenticity in Modernity
It is a deep intellectual reflex of participants in an ancient intellectual or religious tradition to take one’s
task as the inheritor of that tradition to be to preserve pristine and unaltered that which ahs been handed to
us by our forebears and teachers. And so when we see transformation or change in a tradition, insiders
instinctively think of degeneration, and the cant of the degeneration of the Dharma has always been part
of Buddhist rhetoric. From a Buddhist point of view history is often conceived as degeneration from an
omniscient teacher through more and more fallible human beings, with the Dharma gradually attenuating
on the way to disappearance. That vision is central to Buddhism’s self-conception.
In a Western context, however, we think the other way around about history. We conceive of history as
progress from a primitive to a more enlightened view. Kant, in his discussion of the Aufklärung, for
instance, was talking about human progress as an emergence from, not a sinking into, darkness. Now
those are two very different understandings of history. From a modern perspective, even in the Buddhist
tradition we see progress, even if that progress is not acknowledged within the tradition. A Western
scholar sees increasing sophistication of Buddhist philosophical thought, productive proliferation of
readings, and improvements in social institutions and practice.
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As Buddhism engages more deeply with modernity, we can expect this modernist conception of
Buddhism to replace the self-conception in terms of decline. But that will take time and effort, because
for now theBuddhist tradition is a deeply progressive tradition that is beset by anxiety about that very
progress. The typica Buddhist commentary begins by saying: “I’m not saying anything new. All I’m
doing is repeating what’s been said before.” Of course if that were true, nobody what read the
commentary. If it really had all been said before, there would be no reason to waste a palm leaf. But the
traditions are each full of this self-deprecation of originality. On the other hand, we find not
surprisingly—a vindication of the modern perspective--that those whose work is valued most within any
Buddhist tradition are, and always have been, the most theoretically innovative and creative teachers and
scholars. Those to whose texts we and those we read return in the Indian tradition are read and re-read
precisely because while they build on what went before, they innovate, despite their protestations to the
contrary.
So innovation and progress is nothing new, nothing especially modern, in the history of Buddhism, only
its acknowledgment. But this also means that when we note, as I have been noting, the panoply of
changes wrought in the Buddhist tradition in the West and in Asia as a result of Buddhism’s interaction
with modernity, we should not react in horror, and worry that Buddhism is no longer authentic, that it’s
been changed. To react that way is to forget both what Buddhism is about, and to forget its most
fundamental teachings. Buddhism is fundamentally about solving a problem, and the problem is
suffering. It’s fundamentally about a diagnosis of the cause of that problem, and the cause of that problem
is attraction and aversion grounded in confusion. Buddhist practice is grounded in the conviction that the
elimination of that confusion can solve the problem, and that the Buddha outlined a path to that solution.
None of that has been abandoned in Buddhism’s engagement with modernity, just as none of this was
abandoned in any of the countless transformations of Buddhist doctrine and practice between the time of
the Buddha and the modern era; none of that core commitment has been fundamentally transformed, even
though its articulation has been and continues to be transformed in countless ways.
And in the Dhammacakkapavatannasutta the very first teaching that Shakyamuni Buddha gave upon
gaining awakening… Shakyamuni Buddha said, “I teach you a path by the middle. It is not a path of
annihilation, and it is not a path of permanence.” If anything is central to Buddhism it is that statement.
The path of annihilation in the case of the personal continuum is the extreme view according to which that
continuum is cut; that there is no identity and no continuity between successive stages of the individual.
The path of permanence is the extreme view according to which there is something that persists
unchanged through transformation, a self that is the basis of that transformation. The Path of the Middle is
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the path that says that even though the continuum is constantly changing the continuation is never
terminated.
So it is with respect to the continuum of Buddhist teachings, Buddhist transmissions and Buddhist
practices. In the Buddhist tradition we have a continuum of teaching and practice that is constantly
changing and never cut. We do not have to be bothered by the fact that there is nothing permanent that
persists through that change, so long as the continuum continues to develop and to provide a path to the
alleviation of suffering. Nothing could be more Buddhist than impermanence.